January is traditionally
the most common time of the year to initiate divorce proceedings. There
are now over 2.3 million parents bringing up children on their own,
and it has enormous social consequences: children who grow up in single-parent
families usually get worse results in school, leave education earlier,
and are more likely to be involved in crime.

No rational politician could
possibly want to be responsible for social policies that actively encourage
children to lose contact with one of their parents. But that is precisely
what current Government policy does. About 150,000 children a year watch
their parents split up. About one third of the parents end up in court,
fighting over how much time each will spend with the kids. Within a
couple of years, a very large portion of those children will end up
losing all contact with the parent with whom they do not live.

Contact is usually lost for
one very simple reason: the law encourages it to be lost. Legally, there
is no presumption in favour of reasonable contact between children and
both their parents. Lawyers will tell you that there is such a presumption
in case-law: but that presumption is not in favour of reasonable, still
less of extensive, contact. So in law, receiving one postcard a year
counts as "contact". Indeed, actual face-to-face contact can
be eliminated without the "presumption" being violated.

The law allows any consideration,
no matter how trivial, to stop all material contact with the non-resident
parent. Any attempt to get contact increased will be enormously expensive
and will very often end in failure. Once a resident parent sets contact
at a low level, it can take years of litigation merely to get permission
from the courts for a first overnight stay. How can ministers who say
they believe that "children need both parents" preside over
a legal situation which ensures that many children have only one? Part
of the reason may be that the ministers who proclaim such beliefs don't
know what the law actually is. Ministers have stated that "the
current legal position" is that "after separation, both parents
should have a meaningful relationship with their children, provided
it is safe".

But that is wrong. The law
only requires that decisions be made "in the best interests of
the child". And if you want to find out what "the best interests
of the child" amounts to… well, good luck. You won't find
the answer in the legislation, or in any other Government document.
There are hundreds of pages of "advice" to officials on how
cases of conflict between parents over contact with children should
be tackled. But there is not a single sentence that defines in a meaningful
way what protecting and promoting "the interests of the child"
actually involves. Is it, for example, in the best interests of children
that their time should be divided between their parents equally? Or
is the best ratio 70 per cent with one parent and 30 per cent with another?
Or 99:1? Should children have just one parent?

There is no answer in the
legislation, and as a consequence, "the interests of the child"
has become a meaningless incantation that can be used to justify curtailing
contact with one parent to the point where it shrivels to nothing. Which
is exactly what happens, thousands of times every year.

The situation is made still
worse by the fact that the other fundamental "principle" of
the relevant law is that "every case is different". The effect
of that is to ensure that previous decisions cannot be used as a guide
to future ones. Result? There are no principles at all.

To fix the central problem,
the law needs to include the presumption that non-resident parents should
have "reasonable contact" with their children. That presumption
would of course be defeasible if it were clear that the non-resident
parent was, for instance, violent.That would place the burden of proof
on those who wanted to deny reasonable contact - which would make it
impossible to deny such contact for trivial reasons.

As it stands, the law creates
thousands of additional single-parent families every year. Everyone
who cares about the future of the family in Britain must hope that someone
in power has the courage to amend it.